TruckOSaurus said:
Joel's race in The Last of Us doesn't impact anything so I wouldn't have had a problem with Mahershala Ali being cast as Joel. The way I see it, if the casting call was specifically for a black Joel then I would have had reservations because that frames it as a deliberate move to add diversity for diversity's sake but seeing as they ended up casting Pedro Pascal my guess is all they wanted was a talented actor that could play Joel on screen no matter the race of the actor. |
But race does impact things. The character doesn't look like what he was created to be originally, there could even be cultural differences and whatnot. Also, they'd then have to change the race of that character's relatives as well for it to make sense. Should they then have to switch some black characters to white in order to balance things out? At what point does all this just become too convoluted, when the alternative is simply to just stay faithful to the source material?
By the way, I hope Pedro can pull off a nice Texan accent.